The Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9" is just what you might expect: a larger, higher resolution Kindle Fire HD. You also get a faster CPU and graphics that give the tablet a little more punch, and it needs it to drive that lovely 1920 x 1200 IPS display. Like all Kindle Fire tablets, the HD 8.9" runs an extremely customized version of Android with Amazon's carousel UI and dedicated shelves for books, videos, music, apps, web and magazines. It's very easy to use and it excels at its job of delivering Amazon Kindle content, Amazon Prime and Instant Videos, music and apps from the Amazon app store. You can side-load your own content too.

At $299 it's a bargain for a 16 gig, full HD 8.9" tablet. It has excellent stereo speakers with Dolby audio, dual band WiFi with MIMO, Bluetooth and a micro HDMI port. The 1.5GHz dual core processor handles HD video playback and gaming well and the sharp display is a pleasure for reading books and browsing the web. For those who need 3G/4G, there's an LTE 4G model that's considerably more expensive at $499, but that does get you 32 gigs of storage.